BLINDED IN SENSATIONAL 1959 ATTACK

NEW YORK 
Linda Pugach, who was blinded in 1959 when her lover hired hit men to throw lye in her face — and became a media sensation after later marrying him — has died, her husband said Thursday. She was 75.

The infamous New York City crime was detailed in the 2007 documentary “Crazy Love.”

Pugach, who hid behind dark glasses for the rest of her life, died Tuesday at the Long Island Jewish Hospital in Queens. The cause was heart failure, said her husband, Burton Pugach, who spent 14 years in prison for hiring the thugs to attack his then-girlfriend Linda Riss after she spurned him. He was married at the time, and the attack became an instant tabloid sensation.

After his release, Pugach divorced his first wife and persuaded Riss to marry him in 1974. He proposed to her on live television.

“This was a very fairy tale romance,” a sobbing Pugach told The Associated Press on Thursday.

After the release of “Crazy Love,” Pugach praised filmmaker Dan Klores for revealing a story that for the first time “has colors — it was no longer black and white.”

Two decades after his release from prison, Pugach was accused in another case with chilling similarities but acquitted of the charges in 1997. He had been accused of threatening and harassing another lover after she tried to end their five-year affair. That woman testified that he threatened to make it “1959 all over again.”

On Thursday Pugach again denied that he was involved in the lye attack.